Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Deiedra is a band from Santurtzi in the Bilbao area (North of Spain). They are not a raucous Celtic punk band, they play Celtic Folk and Bluegrass music, but they are worth hearing.This promo single includes five tracks from their forthcoming album "Legegabeen kondairak". The 10 tracks album will be released in the following weeks and you can order it from the band (6,00 EUR + p&p): celtic_outlaw@hotmail.com

The first band is Hate is just a Feeling and they are from Stockholm. The band was called Mansic. They have changed the name again and now they are called The Rummies. They play their special brand of punk with fiddle. The link to the band's website is dead, but their myspace page is as follows:

Saturday, June 13, 2009

The Cropdusters were an excellent band fom Lymington (England) that released 3 EPs and a couple of albums between 1986 and 1994. "Imagine the sound of an American mid-West bar transported to Eastern Europe by way of Dublin and a furious fiddler with steam rising from his bow"

The vinyl version of their debut album, "If the Sober go to Heaven" was released by Link records in 1988. Six tracks are taken from their second and third EPs from 1988 ("Banjo Hill" and "Just Poppin' Out to Fight a War") and the other 6 tracks are taken from a professionally recorded gig at the Mean Fiddler (London) in March 1989. The CD version was released some years later by DOJO, and it includes the tracks from their first EP from 1986 ("Hard Times")

In 1992 they released their second album, "Home-Grown Agent Orange" with a Dutch label. Unfortunately, they changed their sound and the fiddle was not so important.

The band re-formed a couple of years ago, after the fiddler player Cob had died due to a heart-attack.

"If the Sober go to Heaven" can be bought in mp3 version form the Cherry Red Records website:

Marcus Stott, the banjo player of the band, has uploaded some videos to You Tube. You can also find some videos from the new version of the band there or at myspace, but I feel that it is better to watch the band at their peak:

Tuesday, June 9, 2009

As I told at the very beginning, the main goal of this blog is to help new bands. However, I have also posted albums/tracks/videos from bands that broke-up or that had come back, as I feel that they deserve to be heard by bigger audiences.

I intend to keep on posting links to vids, but also some boots. Here you will find your favourite bands (The Pogues, Dropkick Murphys, Flogging Molly ...). These boots will be posted by chronological order and the first post is a bootleg from 1983, Dexy's Midnight Runners live at Rockpalast in Germany.

The following biography is taken from wikipedia:

Kevin Rowland (vocals, guitar, at the time going under the pseudonym Carlo Rolan) and Kevin "Al" Archer (vocals, guitar), both previously of The Killjoys, founded the band in 1978 in Birmingham, England, naming the band after Dexedrine, a brand of dextroamphetamine popularly used as a recreational drug among Northern Soul fans at the time. The midnight runners referred to the energy the Dexedrine gave, enabling one to dance all night. "Big" Jim Paterson (trombone), Geoff "JB" Blythe (saxophone, previously of Geno Washington's Ram Jam Band), Steve "Babyface" Spooner (alto saxophone), Pete Saunders (keyboard), Pete Williams (bass) and Bobby "Jnr" Ward (drums) formed the first line-up of the band to record a single, "Dance Stance" (1979). The song was released on the independent Oddball Records, was named "single of the week" by Sounds, and reached number 40 in the British charts, but the next single, "Geno" – about Geno Washington, and released on EMI – was a British Number One in 1980. It featured the band's newest recruits, Andy Leek (keyboards) and Andy "Stoker" Growcott (drums). Rowland had been taken to see Washington perform live by his brother when he was aged only eleven. The success of the song prompted Washington to make a return to live performance, and also saw the departure of Leek, who himself cited the "Top of the Pops thing...people wanting your autograph and that just because you are in the band", while Rowland claimed that he left because "he wasn't into soul music and didn't think the band would ever amount to anything". The band at this time dressed in donkey jackets and woolly hats, and had a look described as "straight out of DeNiro's Mean Streets". Rowland said of the band's sound and look in January 1980: "we didn't want to become part of anyone else's movement. We'd rather be our own movement". Image was very important to the group, with Rowland commenting "We wanted to be a group that looked like something...a formed group, a project, not just random".

"Searching for the Young Soul Rebels", their debut LP, was released later in 1980. The album's sleeve featured a photograph of a Belfast Catholic boy carrying his belongings after being forced from his home in the sectarian clearances of 1969, the half-Irish Rowland explaining "I wanted a picture of unrest. It could have been from anywhere but I was secretly glad that it was from Ireland". Of the album's title, Rowland said "I don't know...I just liked the sound of it, really".

(...)

Rowland then recruited fiddle players Helen O'Hara (from Archer's new group, the Blue Ox Babes), Steve Brennan and Roger MacDuff, known collectively as "The Emerald Express". With the addition of new bass player, Giorgio Kilkenny, this line-up recorded "Too-Rye-Ay" in 1982, a hybrid of soul and Celtic folk, with strong influences from the music of Van Morrison, the new sound accompanied by a new look, with the band attired in dungarees, scarves, leather waistcoats, and what was described as "a generally scruffy right-off-the-farm look", or "a raggle-taggle mixture of gypsy, rural Irish and Steinbeck Okie". Rowland said of the new image: "These are my best clothes. Again it just feels right for the music. Everybody else is dressing up sort of straightlaced and we come in wearing these and it's like, y'know here we are, a bit of hoedowning is even possible". The first single, "The Celtic Soul Brothers", was mildly successful but "Come on Eileen" soon followed, and became a Number One hit in both the UK and the United States (and, in the former, the biggest-selling single of 1982). The follow-up "Jackie Wilson Said (I'm in Heaven When You Smile)", a cover of a Van Morrison tune, also reached the top 5 in the UK singles chart. The band sang this song on the UK comedy "The Young Ones". When the band performed this single on the BBC TV music show Top Of The Pops, which was broadcast live, there was an infamous mix-up (or deliberate prank) by the BBC engineers in charge of the background graphics. Instead of a picture of Jackie Wilson, the American soul singer, the band performed in front of a photo of Jocky Wilson, the Scottish darts player.

An finally, before the download link, some lines taken from Ann Scanlon 's book "The Pogues - The Lost Decade" (Omnibus Press, London 1988) page 9

"A few weeks later, Dexys Midnight Runners had their third coming: with three-piece strings and evergreen washed-out dungarees, the Celtic sold ones unleashed the year's loudest refrain with "Come On Eileen".

"Suddenly there was all this press about Dexys and all that Celtic thing and it just seemed like a really bizarre coincidence", says Jem.

"We just thought these blokes had come up with a watered down version of what we were doing", says Shane. "We thought they should have stuck to soul which they were good at"."

Friday, June 5, 2009

Summer is coming in a few weeks and, therefore, the festival season is open. Pressgang was a wonderful English festival band from Reading that unfortunately broke up in 2000 after having released some vinyl recordings and 5 CDs. However, around 2005-2006 they played some festivals and decided to come back. Now they are touring the North of Germany and they intend to release a new album.

Tracks from the different albums can be downloaded one by one from their German agent's website. But you can download all of them from the second link, together with the biography, full discography with the artwork, the links to some reviews, the link to an interview with Damian and the links to some on-line stores where you can buy their recordings.